In Detroit, a Case of Selling Art and Selling Out

DETROIT — These days, the message screens above the main ticket desk at the Detroit Institute of Arts regularly flash the phrase “Thank You Voters.” Unusual as it may seem among announcements about exhibitions and events at this world-class museum, it belongs there. On Aug. 7, 2012, the citizens of the three counties that contain and surround Detroit — Wayne, Oakland and Macomb — voted in favor of a 10-year commitment to a small increase in real estate taxes that would guarantee the institute $23 million a year, roughly two-thirds of its annual operating budget.

Because of these voters, a museum whose building and collection were created and sustained by a patchwork of money controlled by city and state officials — as well as donations from loyal patrons with names like Ford, Dodge, Scripps and Firestone — will be primarily and more directly supported by its public. The vote, an unusual display of public support, has given the Detroit Institute of Arts a greater financial stability than it has enjoyed in years.

So it is all the sadder that in late May the Detroit Institute began to be cruelly undermined as the city, once an epicenter of American industry and industriousness, hit bottom after years of mismanagement and shrinking population.

In that ever-lengthening narrative titled When Bad Things Happen to Good Museums, few developments are as deeply alarming and as cluelessly self-destructive as the recent suggestion that the City of Detroit, which owns the institute’s building and its collection, should sell some of the art to help cover about $18 billion of municipal debts. Were this to happen, it would be a betrayal of public trust and donors’ bequests and a violation of the museum’s nonprofit status. It also makes no economic sense. The Detroit Institute of Arts is one of the few remaining jewels in Detroit’s tattered identity, and is essential to the city’s recovery.

Detroit finally applied for bankruptcy in July. But even before that, Kevyn Orr, the city’s state-appointed emergency manager, raised the idea of selling works, as if the institute were a goose whose golden eggs included art by Rembrandt, van Gogh, Caravaggio, van Eyck and Breughel.

Bill Schuette, Michigan’s attorney general, issued a statement that such a sale would not be legal. Nonetheless, citing the city’s responsibility to appraise all its “assets,” Mr. Orr enlisted the auction house Christie’s to appraise its holdings for a reported fee of $200,000, a process, barely begun, that will take weeks.

Of course, Christie’s is doing what it is built to do, but that doesn’t eliminate the smell of amoral opportunism. Perhaps the time will soon come when financially troubled cities and states will call upon it for appraisals of things like Central Park, or Faneuil Hall in Boston.

Merely considering a priceless collection as an “asset” — and encouraging the public to do so — is pernicious and predatory. As Annmarie Erickson, the institute’s chief operating officer, put it to me on Friday, “The more price, value and sale are discussed, the more palatable it becomes to people, the less shocking.”

Ms. Erickson also pointed out that if major works were sold, the buyers most likely able to afford them would be private collectors from Russia, China or the Middle East.

The latest threat to the Detroit Institute of Arts has struck fear in the hearts of people both inside and outside the art world, and especially among museum officials whose institutions are similarly entangled with city governments. It raises many questions, foremost, about who owns the art housed in public nonprofit institutions, and what art is good for. Those who answer that it is held “in public trust” are not just mouthing idealistic catchwords.

The sale can be contemplated because the city does, at least on paper, own the Detroit Institute’s collection, though it paid for only some of it. But even the legal ownership of the art is very much in question.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The Detroit Institute of Arts opened as a private entity in 1888 in a Richardsonian Romanesque building. In 1919, the museum and the city signed an agreement whereby the city would build, own and maintain a new building; at that time, the museum also ceded ownership of its art collection to the city.

For many years, the city paid the bulk of the institute’s operating costs. And during the 1920s, especially, when the city was flush from the thriving automobile industry, it even helped — but only helped — the museum make some major acquisitions. For example, The Detroit Free Press reported this week, of $431,000 spent on acquisitions in 1927 (the equivalent of $5.8 million today), only $170,000 came from the city.

The city’s contribution to both operating costs and acquisitions declined after the 1929 stock market crash. It stopped contributing to acquisitions in 1955, and, by 1977, its total yearly contribution had dwindled to less than $1 million.

Yet little of this matters in principle. The city, like the institute, exists for the benefit of the people of Detroit, the state and the region. It is not so much the owner, as the steward, of the art.

In addition, its support for the museum came from generations of working people’s paying income and real estate taxes. These taxes also enabled the Detroit Institute to pay no taxes, fulfilling a pledge to operate as a nonprofit institution that was part of the 1919 agreement with the city. So while the city may own the art in writing, the notion that it is held in public trust has a very real monetary basis.

If the sales take place, the Detroit Institute will be the most prominent victim of the separation of daily existence and culture that so darkens American life. High culture, especially, is all too frequently viewed as a dispensable frivolity by far too many politicians. Witness the drastic cuts to art and music programs in public schools across the country.

One reason such cuts are tolerated is America’s shortsighted separation of education and economics. If the United States aims to produce more and import less, it needs designers and inventors of things to be produced. Such skills require just the kind of imagination and ingenuity that are nourished by art training from an early age and by museums.

In his September newsletter, Graham W. J. Beal, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, wrote that “selling any art would be tantamount to closing the museum.” This was not hyperbole. As nonprofits, museums can sell art only to buy other, supposedly better art. If Detroit’s art were sold to repay the city’s debts, it would violate the city’s own 1919 agreement with the institute. It would also automatically rescind the year-old tax vote by the three counties.

Detroit has survived many losses, but the destruction of this museum would leave a wound that would be impossible to bear. It would mean not only the loss of a great civic achievement and of a beacon, but also of an essential life tool.

Correction: September 21, 2013

A critic’s notebook article on Sept. 11 about whether the Detroit Institute of Arts, which is owned by the City of Detroit, should sell artworks to help pay off the city’s debt misstated the percentage of Michigan public schools that have arts programs, and erroneously attributed the figure to Annmarie Erickson, the institute’s chief operating officer. The Michigan Department of Education estimates that more than 90 percent of the public schools have arts programs. It is not the case that “only about 3 percent” have them.

A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Selling Art and Selling Out. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe